Television
The Concept
Watching television provides a very unique and instructive method for shifting your perspective around, because in essence, a television is another world, with other people, sounds, qualities, and space.
General Exercises
- Perform any of the Rooms and Boundaries exercises, treating the television itself as a window into another room.
- Many of the People exercises can be applied to the people on television, although many of them won't apply in the same way.
- Two Rooms Exercise
- Enter a mindful state, and acknowledge that the television is a source of light, motion and sound in the room you are in. Mindfully notice the shape of your own room, what objects are in the room giving off sound and light or moving. For example, an overhead fan is providing a breeze, a gentle sound, and constant motion. Notice that the television is merely another object in the room, with no more significance than things like a fan or a lamp.
- Now shift your perspective into the television. Notice that you can be mindful of what is going on inside the television (the show, the movie, whatever it is) as if that was the whole world. Be fully present as if your universe was contained in the same universe as what is on TV. Your physical body, and the room around you melt into the background, and now you can engage in basic mindful activities from the perspective of a fly on the wall within the TV.
- What are the various background sounds? (Birds, cars, people talking softly at a table.) - Try some of the Sounds Exercises.
- Whatever mindfulness exercises you personally connect with, try to apply them to what is on the television.
- Once more shift your perception, now to include both the world of the television, and your own world, as if the space and experience within the TV was taking place within the room you are in. This will not make contextual sense in many cases, but in some cases (for example) it would be easy to see the people on the TV sitting at a table and feel that they are sitting at a table in the room with you.
- Note that this exercise is very similar to how you might play with your perception in a Mirror. Try adapting some of those exercises to the television.